Student Affairs and Technology

"If you’re a web developer, designer, social media strategist, PR person, or marketer working in higher education, you know that there’s a lot of valuable content that can provide insights, examples, and inspiration for your own initiatives."

Halloween seems to bring out the best in higher education web-based creativity. When Todd Sanders (#SAtech Profle #1) sent me an email with "Academic Zombies" in the subject, I knew I was in for a treat! The Office of Academic Advising at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (UWGB) has, according to Sanders, "taken to the social web in a big way since July. They've ditched safe and cautious, for risky and fun. This isn't a social web success story, it's a story on the reevaluation of current communication practices... daring to stand out, putting in the extra effort, not fearing failure."

At last year's EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, it seemed like everyone was talking about mobile technology. Whether or not a product was actually ready for human consumption made little difference to some companies as mobile dominated most conversations.

Okay. I have a very large caveat for this post. This is personal. It's also professional. What can I say, I love what I do. It's a job that feels like art. The reason why I have a blog on Inside Higher Ed (IHE) is because of my personal/professional blog posts.

Prior to this year's EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, Pearson announced a new "self-service learning management system (LMS)" called OpenClass. Billed as being completely free, OpenClass integrates with Google Apps for Education and is available from the Google Apps Marketplace. The user interface (UI) is stunning. It's as if a traditional LMS was given a facelift by the Google Docs team (Note that Google did not create OpenClass). The interface is simple and reminds me of a blog. It's more web 2.0 in look and feel. The top portion of the UI features Gmail, Google Calendar, Gchat, Google Docs, and Skype icons. With such an aesthetically pleasing UI (coupled with useful functionality) I predict that students will love using OpenClass.

October has been tremendously busy. With an estimated 20 or 30 potential posts in my brain queue, I've decided to do a quick post as an introduction to further reflections on everything that has taken place in October. Think of this post as an appetizer or perhaps as an usually large amuse-bouche.

The exhibit hall at the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference is enormous. Higher education technology providers construct massive display booths to engage conference attendees. However, for companies who are just starting out, large displays are just not possible. At this year's EDUCAUSE Annual Conference (#EDU11 on Twitter) there will be a new area in the exhibit hall for new companies.

The Student Affairs Women Talk Tech blog recently featured a post on accessibility resources. Written by a friend of mine, Kathryn Magura, the post includes a link to an ADA resource page, information about the seven principles of universal design, and a link to MIT's resource guide on web accessibility.

To all the PR firms who are doing a great job of building relationships and sending out relevant pitches, I apologize. This post is not about you. This post is for two distinct audiences: PR firms that give PR a bad name and the companies that pay PR firms for atrocious PR tactics.